


From "Humbug" to "Hollywood A. D.": Comedy and The X-Files

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [20]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Comedy, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, hollywood a d, humbug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 22:39:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2127171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Comedy played an important role in establishing The X-Files as a zeitgeisty hit in its first few seasons. One of the signs of the show’s deterioration toward the end of its life is the devolution of the comic episode, as demonstrated by two of the worst episodes in the show’s first seven seasons: “Hollywood, A.D.” and “Fight Club,” written by David Duchovny and Chris Carter, respectively. About which the best thing I can say is that they have inspired me to go back and revisit an early and classic X-Files episode that got lost in the shuffle: Darin Morgan’s “Humbug.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	From "Humbug" to "Hollywood A. D.": Comedy and The X-Files

 

 

Since the tragic death of Robin Williams yesterday, the Internet has been full of ruminations about comedy, the relationship between comedy and depression, people being surprised that there is such a relationship, and so on. The idea that being funny is serious business still seems to come as a surprise to a lot of people who consume comedy. My guess is that it comes as no surprise whatsoever to people who create it. 

I should qualify that: it comes as no surprise whatsoever to people who create  _good_ comedy.

I personally have always taken comedy seriously. Not only has my own sense of humor allowed me to cope with situations that might otherwise have driven me mad, but I believe that at its best, comedy can—like other genres and forms we are more typically willing to consider ‘great’—change our perspective on life, the universe, humanity, relationships, justice, morality, everything. Comedy is a way to present ugly truths to people in an entertaining way; and though this often doesn’t have the material effect that you’d wish it would, it does eventually start to matter if you keep at it for long enough.  _The Daily Show_ became the phenomenon it is now because it was one of the few American media outlets willing to tell the ludicrous, infuriating, tragic truth about the George W. Bush administration’s corruption, criminality, and incompetence. In that sense, comedy is not just about laughter; it’s about despair, desperation, the hideous knowledge that satire is one of the few weapons left to us against something we’re not sure we can fight and not even entirely sure we can survive.

Comedy played an important role in establishing  _The X-Files_ as a zeitgeisty hit in its first few seasons. One of the signs of the show’s deterioration toward the end of its life is the devolution of the comic episode, as demonstrated by two of the worst episodes in the show’s first seven seasons: “Hollywood, A.D.” and “Fight Club,” written by David Duchovny and Chris Carter, respectively. About which the best thing I can say is that they have inspired me to go back and revisit an early and classic X-Files episode that got lost in the shuffle: Darin Morgan’s “Humbug.”

One of the reasons “Humbug” was so important in establishing this show is that it uses the show’s premise, which is based on our fascination with the strange, the bizarre, the weird, and the grotesque, to go right after the way TV and other forms of popular culture usually treat the relationship between outside and inside. “Humbug” is set in a community inhabited almost entirely by circus freaks. In other words, apart from Mulder and Scully, nearly everyone in this episode has some sort of physical peculiarity which is grotesque enough to command the horrified attention of ‘normal’ spectators, and they make their living by exploiting that fascination. “Humbug” starts off by showing us how the show itself exploits our horror of the monstrous: we see a sinister-looking aquatic creature zooming through the water, headed straight for two young children playing in the pool. When the monster ‘attacks,’ however, we discover that he’s the beloved father of these ‘normal’ children, who have no fear of him at all, and who horse around in the pool with him for a while before heading into the house. Then, alas, poor Alligator Man—he has a skin condition that produces scaly ridges; that’s his trademark—gets attacked by some other unseen thing zooming through the water. And then Mulder and Scully have to come down to investigate.

Once they get there, the episode becomes among other things about playing with the disjunction between Mulder’s (and to a lesser extent, Scully’s) inside and outside. Both of them are close enough to the typical entertainment industry mold to present as the conventionally attractive and fairly standard-issue detective heroes of a typical police procedural. No doubt this was necessary in order to get the show on the air. Inside, however, Mulder is deeply, DEEPLY weird, which makes him in a way an inversion of the characters he’s investigating, all of whom look bizarre to us but are perfectly at home in a community in which the bizarre is the norm. And yet at the same time, his weirdness is in a way so square—his earnest and idealistic search for The Truth in a world where most people would die before they admitted to being naive enough to believe it existed—that the opposition kind of folds back in on itself. This is what elevates that exchange with Mr. Nutt, the manager of the motel where they stay, who is initially very offended by Mulder’s question about whether he’s done any circus work. He goes off on a long rant about how we shouldn’t judge people by external appearances, winding up with a deliberately stereotyping ‘reading’ of Mulder based on his own external appearance in which he reduces Mulder to an FBI agent. To which a somewhat at-a-loss Mulder replies, “But I am an FBI agent.” The manager just looks at him with great disgruntlement and says, “Sign here.”

Such a great and complicated moment there. The ability to deduce things about someone’s interiority by reading their surface characteristics became foundational to the genre thanks to the deductive magic of one Sherlock Holmes back in the 1890s. Then, as now, that kind of ‘reading’ relies on stereotyping; it only works because most people turn out to conform to the detective’s expectations, which are based on the conventional wisdom of his own universe. This character is attempting to show Mulder the error of not only his ways, but the whole genre’s ways; but he can’t, because he is in fact embedded in that genre. Though “Humbug” does a great job of giving the “freaks” subjectivity and dignity, it is more or less contractually required to end up criminalizing the monster committing all these murders. Mulder, meanwhile, both does and doesn’t conform to what the genre expects from a character in his position, something which often produces confusion. This ‘reading’ of him as an FBI agent is stereotyped and wrong in that it fails to account for his individuality, and yet it is, as they say, close enough for government work: he is in fact an FBI agent, no matter how atypical he may be.

All the way through, “Humbug” plays around with what’s weird and what’s normal in ways that keep you guessing. Scully, though she demonstrates her own inner weirdness by successfully convincing Blockhead that she has eaten one of his wasps, also gets humbugged with the old “This Way to the Egress” trick that Barnum famously used. Mulder and Scully can’t break themselves of their ingrained suspicion of the unlovely and the unusual; once they discover that their sheriff used to be a dog-faced boy, they start treating him like a suspect, only shamed out of this by his discovery of them in his backyard—as Mulder and Scully put it in a moment that I love so madly—“exhuming…your potato.” When finally they figure out what’s going on, we don’t get quite the resolution we were expecting. Lanny, whose basset-hound-eyed stare of tragic I-am-a-hot-mess-but-I-will-maintain-my-dignity-to-the-end stoicism is one of the things that gives this episode its heart, denies that his conjoined twin Leonard intends to kill his victims: “I believe he is merely seeking another brother.” And Mulder and Scully, in the end, prove unable to bring the killer to justice. Instead, the community polices itself, and the Conundrum, true to his geek calling, eats the killer.

Anyway. So, my point is: yes, “Humbug” is a comic episode, but it is  _good_ comedy because on a deep level it takes the characters and the situation and the show itself seriously. It doesn’t just ‘poke fun’ at Mulder and Scully; it uses their bewilderment when faced with this bizarre situation to develop and unfold their own strange characters. It doesn’t just ‘poke fun’ at the community of circus freaks; it challenges us to ask ourselves why their external oddities move us to laughter or disgust. It doesn’t just ‘poke fun’ at the conventions of the police procedural; it reveals something important and problematic about why those conventions work. It doesn’t do this pedantically, or didactically, in such a way as to piss the viewer off; but all the same it reveals things to us that we never knew before. And that’s what makes anything, whether it’s an episode of a TV show or a Great Work of Literature, worthwhile. 

"Clyde Bruckman," about which I have already gone on at some length, is the same way. But somewhere along the last few seasons, Chris Carter, David Duchovny, and probably many of the X-Files’ other movers and shakers became so tired of the show and the new set of conventions that it established that they could no longer take it seriously enough to generate that kind of comedy. "Fight Club" is supposed to be a comic episode; but it’s not really funny. It’s angry. I can make sense of it, in fact, only as a long howl of rage on Chris Carter’s part about the fact that he feels chained to these characters and this show and yet can’t bring himself to set himself free. The episode ends with Mulder and Scully getting the crap beaten out of them; and though we don’t literally see that happen, we get two quite explicit representations of it: once when the Mulder and Scully doubles beat the shit otu of each other at the beginning of the episode, and once at the very end when Scully and Mulder reappear in their office having been very recently patched up after the bloodbath. It was a visceral shock to me to see how battered both of them were. If it wasn’t a visceral shock to Chris Carter, well, that says something about how little he still cared about either of his most popular creations. 

"Hollywood A.D." is obviously trying to be funny. But unlike "Humbug," there is no base level on which the show itself or anything in it is taken seriously. The movie made based on the case—starring Garry Shandler as Mulder and Tea Leoni as Scully—is presented initially as a travesty of the  _real_ show and the real Mulder and Scully. That scene actually works pretty well. But then we gradually discover that the ‘real story’ behind the movie is actually much more ridiculous, incoherent, nonsensical, and farcically implausible. There’s no attempt to create anything real for the parody to be about. It’s just visual gags and broad caricatures and in-jokes. In a word, it’s sophomoric. It’s like National Lampoon’s The X-Files.

Anyway. These two episodes make me sad, because they show how slow and painful the show’s death was. But at least we’ll always have “Humbug.” And I guess my point is: when you’re laughing at something, don’t just assume that ‘funny’ is some kind of universal constant, some essential thing you don’t have to question, an ephemeral surface phenomenon about which there is no need to think twice. It’s amazing, really, where ‘funny’ can come from, and what kind of work it can do.  


End file.
